AMD will announce Ryzen 7000 CPUs August 29. Here’s everything we know about them

For those who can't wait to get a glimpse of the chips as the launch still nearly two weeks away, an alleged picture of an upcoming Ryzen 7000 series SKU, in the form of the Ryzen 7 7700X, has leaked, courtesy of an AnandTech forum member cortexa99.

The picture shows a retail 7700X seated inside the new AM5 motherboard. The new socket is the first LGA-based mainstream socket on the AMD side, as so far the company has been using PGA.

This means that final retail samples of the chips are already going around, and it could lend some credibility to the rumor of delayed reviews and availability that we had earlier today.

The Ryzen 7 7700X is purportedly the octa-core 16 thread SKU (8C/16T) in the Ryzen 7000 lineup. Other SKUs allegedly are the 6C/12T Ryzen 5 7600X, the 12C/24T Ryzen 9 7900X and the 16C/32T Ryzen 9 7950X.

Source and image: Cortexa99 (AnandTech forum)

First alleged photo of a retail Ryzen 7700X inside Socket AM5 leaks and it looks glorious

A month later in June, a leak revealed that the company was planning for a big event on September 15 and their date was backed up by what appeared to be photos showing preparations for a big launch. Although at that moment, it was not clear if the September 15 date was actually the availability date or the announcement date for the Ryzen 7000.

Fast-forward to early August, and we had a new report that said the actual announcement of the products will be happening at the end of the month on August 29th, and this has now been confirmed by AMD itself.

And although there wasn't a mention of the September 15 availability date in AMD's own press release, reports suggest that the products themselves will be available to purchase starting on that day.

If you are wondering why there could be a near-three week difference between the announcement and the retail availability, according to a reviewer, the company was forced to push this back since it is having certain firmware related problems. The person posted this on the Chiphell forums and said that the embargo or NDA had to re-signed due to the purported delay.

While there is no confirmation of this, firmware issues are not uncommon on new CPU launches, especially one of this scale where AMD is moving to an all new socket. AM5 which will bring new features like DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and more.

Source: nApoleon (Chiphell forum) via VideoCardz

AMD Ryzen 7000 and Socket AM5 alleged BIOS issues pushed availability date back

In Stray, the postapocalyptic adventure game from BlueTwelve Studio, players are cast as an unnamed orange and brown-striped tabby cat. At various points in this cat’s journey across a futuristic, neon-drenched city, button prompts will appear, floating over the arms of leather couches or hovering before the metal legs of bipedal humanoid robots. Press the corresponding controller inputs and the cat will rhythmically dig its claws into fabric or rub its head along the limbs of synthetic people. Sometimes it may even jump onto the lap of a reclining robot and curl into a tight ball to catch a quick snooze.

This kind of behavior is immediately familiar to anyone who’s spent time around cats, and it’s believably animated enough that the game appears to perfectly capture the animal’s essence. But spend enough time with Stray and the illusion fades, replaced by a series of contradictions. The feline protagonist may look exactly like a cat, but it doesn’t actually seem to be one in any sense beyond appearance.

A nagging sense of disbelief begins to creep in from the moment the player begins moving their character around the screen. The cat, as is to be expected of most video game avatars, responds immediately to the player’s directions. It hops neatly onto metal handrails and ductwork, following paths through the urban landscape as if guided by an omnipotent laser pointer. Unlike a real cat, it never seems wary of open spaces or doubtful that it can execute a superheroic leap from one spot to another. It never hides out of view to carefully monitor its surroundings.

Once it’s teamed up with an artificially intelligent drone called B-12, it also, well, doggedly follows instructions when real cats would be more likely to ignore them entirely. As Stray continues, it becomes difficult to ignore how essentially un-catlike the character becomes. The nimble little creature works toward specific goals, solving multistep puzzles that require abstract thinking. No matter what flashing lights or interesting smells it stumbles on, the cat stays entirely focused on tasks that have nothing to do with its species’ actual interests, like eating stinky fish treats, hunting prey, or finding warm, hidden spots to nap in for hours on end.

All of these points may seem like unfair criticism—nitpicks that demand more from a mainstream video game than it’s capable of reasonably offering—but they point toward the knot of contradictions that ultimately make Stray such a fascinating game. By considering the ways in which Stray’s cat protagonist really doesn’t act like a cat at all, a question forms: How would any video game maker authentically create an experience that captures what it might be like to inhabit the role of a nonhuman animal?

A cat’s world is basically unknowable to the human mind. As much as we anthropomorphize the animal’s behavior to make sense of it, cats are shaped by an evolutionary path that’s resulted in an outlook that differs greatly from our own. While we can comfortably live alongside domestic cats, attempting to imagine how another animal perceives our shared world requires a questioning of how we understand reality itself. Doing so isn’t just a tough proposition; it may also be, at this point in time at least, close to impossible.

Stray slinks in and out of engagement with this problem during its protagonist’s journey through the sci-fi city. Though its cat mostly acts in decidedly human ways, BlueTwelve Studio appears very aware of how difficult a task it set out for itself from the game’s premise onward, and has created a narrative that acknowledges its anthropomorphic design.

Set in a far future, robot-filled take on Kowloon Walled City, Stray presents a world that’s tried to move on without human rule—but one that can’t escape the long shadow of our influence. In it, a domestic animal whose species has learned to live alongside humanity ends up living alongside robots that emulate humanity instead. As the cat moves through the game’s city, it discovers machine-run neighborhoods whose mechanical citizens have recreated the kind of societies an extinct humanity has left to them. The achievements of our species carry on in robot visual artists and musicians, their crafts plied in friendly robot communities. Our failures, more notably, find new life in the form of brutal robot police forces and unnecessary, strictly enforced class hierarchies that see our machine successors sorting themselves into strict strata of haves and have-nots.

At the end of the game—and without describing the plot in detail—the cat and robots can only find their way toward a more fulfilling existence by discarding the dictates of the humans who previously modeled society for them. These thematic concerns justify BlueTwelve’s decision to cast Stray’s player as a wordless cat. The game simply wouldn’t make the same impression if it didn’t star a domestic animal alongside humanlike robots—if it wasn’t the story of the world passing from our hands and into the paws and steely fingers of the organic and synthetic creatures we previously controlled.

Still, this approach gives the impression that Stray’s creators found an excuse for, instead of a solution to, the problem of how to design a nonhuman animal as the protagonist of a video game.

In previous years, other designers tackled this issue more directly. Japan Studio and GenDesign’s brilliant 2016 release, The Last Guardian, for example, partners the player character—a human boy—with an enormous mythological creature named Trico whose appearance and behavior references dogs, cats, horses, and birds. Rather than respond immediately to the player’s commands, Trico needs to learn to trust the boy and will balk at certain directions, capturing the idea that it’s a living animal with its own thoughts and feelings about the world it lives in.

Videocult’s 2017 Rain World, like Stray, allows players to inhabit the role of a nonhuman animal—in its case, a wiggly, soft-boned creature that resembles a doe-eyed white cat—but uses its sprawling levels to model the violence of a strange ecosystem that forces the player to consider their surroundings less like an apex predator-human, and adopt the viewpoint of an animal in the middle of the food chain instead. In place of clearly outlined mission guidelines and written or verbal communication, Rain World’s main character must learn (in often bloody ways) how to use its unique physiology to navigate a landscape where food and shelter are hard-won, and the mortal threats posed by hungry predators and the natural world itself are never distant enough to ignore.

That Stray ignores the tradition of design experimentation that made both The Last Guardian and Rain World stand out is unfortunate. Although a very good game in its own right, its lack of interest in modeling a cat beyond the kind of behaviors mentioned earlier—nuzzling, scratching, curling up on laps—means that it’s also a game that’s more interested in animals as plot devices rather than potential avenues for new ways of thinking about our relationship to other species.

As Stray’s plot suggests, breaking free of humanity’s influence may be the best chance an Earth doomed by our actions has to provide the planet’s other inhabitants with a future. If we can better imagine the world that animals perceive through our art and science, we can naturally decenter our own species’ viewpoint and hopefully gain some of the humility needed to reassess our relationship with our natural environment, too.

The Freedom of Playing a Very Un-Catlike Cat in Stray

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US chipmakers hit by sudden downturn after pandemic boom

AMD is ready to unveil its next-generation Ryzen processors for the new AM5 socket. The company today revealed that the upcoming CPUs would debut on August 29, 2022, during the “together we advance_PCs” live stream event.

According to the press release published on the official AMD website, Dr. Lisa Su and other AMD executives will present details about the newest Zen4 architecture that powers the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU Series. These will be the first processors for the AM5 socket “built around the latest technologies,” such as DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.

As rumors and leaks claim, AMD will unveil four SKUs: Ryzen 9 7950X and 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X. And although the main focus will shift from AM4 to AM5, AMD is far from being down with the good-old AM4 platforms. Reputable sources recently revealed that AMD might show more Zen3D CPUs for the outgoing socket, plus some fresh budget models.

You can follow the “together we advance_PCs” event live on the AMD YouTube channel at 7 PM ET on Monday, August 29.

AMD will announce its next generation Ryzen processors on August 29

The slide-out headset stand might leave an indent in the padding but is very practical. Image: Dell

Alienware is releasing a pair of new gaming monitors, including a 25-incher with a 360Hz variable refresh rate and a 27-inch Quad HD option that can overclock to 280Hz. Both monitors sport leaner designs than the brand’s other recent offerings, with smaller bases and slide-out headset stands, giving users more desk real estate for massive desk pads and full-sized keyboards.

The smaller model (AW2523HF) aesthetically does not scream gaming gear: it’s all matte black plastic with a glossy Alienware head logo and the number “25” on the back, which doesn’t light up like the 27-inch (AW2723DF) model does. The 25-inch model is equipped with a Full HD 1080p IPS screen with Vesa AdaptiveSync certification, HDR10 support, and 99 percent of the sRGB spectrum.

With the 27-inch option, Alienware is also adding DisplayHDR 600 certification and a Creator Mode option that gives you 95 percent of the DCI-P3 color spectrum, as well as full sRGB color space, making it more color accurate if you want to edit videos or photos on it while Steam is closed. The IPS panel’s native refresh rate is 240Hz and also includes both Nvidia G-Sync certification and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, unlike the smaller model that only sports the latter.

As far as connectivity, both models have similar arrangements that include two HDMI 2.0 ports, Type-B USB 3.2 Gen 1 upstream with four USB-A downstream ports, line out and headphone jacks, and a DisplayPort 1.4 port. There’s also a joystick control that operates Alienware’s revamped OSD settings screen, and thankfully, the monitors don’t have external power bricks. Unfortunately, there’s no USB-C connectivity for those looking to use these as laptop docking stations for office work.

These displays aren’t especially remarkable compared to Dell / Alienware’s other offerings like the 34-inch curved Alienware QD-OLED, its monster gaming laptop with a 480Hz refresh screen, or 4K VRR monitors with HDMI 2.1 that work well with Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 consoles. But what the new monitors do offer are basic PC gaming needs, great for esports players not looking for extracurricular frills.

Both monitors will come with Dell’s three-year warranty that includes an advance exchange service if you have any problems — including minor bright pixel defects. The 25-inch model will be available on September 7th for $449.99, with the 27-incher available on October 6th for $649.99.

Alienware’s new high-speed gaming monitors have a place to hang your headphones

Almost-certain Nest Wifi appears at FCC with Wi-Fi 6E on board

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California selected Microchip Technology of Chandler, Arizona, to develop a High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor that will advance all types of future space missions, from planetary exploration to lunar and Mars surface missions, NASA said in a release Monday.

The processor architecture will allow computing power to be scalable based on mission needs, which will significantly improve overall computing efficiency for exploration missions. The design will also make the processor more reliable, enabling spacecraft computers to perform calculations up to 100 times faster than today's state-of-the-art space computers, according to NASA.

"Our current spaceflight computers were developed almost 30 years ago," said Wesley Powell, NASA's principal technologist for advanced avionics. "While they have served past missions well, future NASA missions demand significantly increased onboard computing capabilities and reliability. The new computing processor will provide the advances required in performance, fault tolerance, and flexibility to meet these future mission needs."

Once the processor is developed, it may also be useful to other government agencies and planet-based commercial systems with similar mission-critical edge computing needs.

Potential applications include industrial automation, edge computing, time-sensitive ethernet data transmission, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things gateways, NASA said.

Microchip Technology will take three years to design and deliver the HSPC processor. During this time, the company will contribute significant research and development under a $50 million firm-fixed contract with NASA. Microchip Technology said it is pleased to be selected as NASA's partner in developing this technology.

"We are making a joint investment with NASA on a new trusted and transformative compute platform. It will deliver comprehensive Ethernet networking, advanced artificial intelligence/machine learning processing and connectivity support while offering unprecedented performance gain, fault-tolerance, and security architecture at low power consumption," said Babak Samimi, corporate vice president for Microchip Technology's communications business unit.

Source

Holocaust educator Mariana Smith, 87, had previously recorded hours worth of details about her life, many of which were unknown to mourners.

Filmed on 20 synchronous cameras, the footage was then processed by experts who tagged the clips of Smith answering questions.

This trains an AI system to respond to mourners’ questions in a natural way that mimics a regular conversation.

Unlike ‘deep fake’ technology which can make a subject say things they didn’t in real life, the StoryFile system uses real responses to answer questions. If it doesn’t have an appropriate answer, it encourages audience members to ask another question.

Devised by her son, Stephen Smith, the technology has previously been used to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors.

Describing the video, Stephen said: ‘Relatives were staggered by my mum’s new honesty at her funeral. She had been too embarrassed to reveal her true childhood.

‘A question about it at the funeral suddenly had her revealing her childhood in India that we knew nothing about.’

For the first time, family members heard about ‘difficult topics such as the divorce of her parents and living as an immigrant from India,’ Stephen told The Telegraph.

‘She was also prepared to answer interesting questions about her points of view on politics, the environment and the future, which was interesting because I had never had those conversations with her before.’

As well as her childhood in India, Stephen learnt more about his mother’s spiritual beliefs. She was a Seventh-Day Adventist, meaning she celebrated the sabbath on Saturdays.

A devoted Holocaust campaigner, she set up the UK’s National Holocaust Centre in 1995.

© Provided by Metro

Marina recorded hours of footage answering a range of questions before her death (Credit: Storyfile)

Stephen said Storyfile’s technology would appeal to people who have felt unable to share parts of their lives with the relatives.

He explained: ‘People feel emboldened when recording their data. Mourners might get a freer, truer version of their lost loved one.’

The technology, which was previously used to record the memories of Star Trek actor William Shatner, is similar to other software platforms developed in recent years to help families grieve.

HereAfter AI’s ‘Life Story Avatar’ also allows relatives to hold ‘conversations’ with loved ones after they have passed away.

The app can share memories, advice and even jokes with loved ones, all populated from voice recordings made before a person dies.

Source

In ordinary materials, the flow of electrons is strongly influenced by impurities and atomic vibrations, both of which cause electrons to scatter. In ultraclean materials and at near-zero temperatures, where such classical processes are absent, the electrons move unimpeded across the material, like billiard balls. In the rare cases, however, when the electrons are strongly interacting between themselves, the electrons are predicted to move collectively, like a fluid.

In 2017, a team led by Leonid Levitov at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, together with colleagues at the University of Manchester in the UK, observed fluid-like electron behaviour in a sample of graphene (a sheet of carbon atoms just one atom thick) that contained a thin channel with several pinch points. Current sent through the channel flowed through the constrictions with hardly any resistance, implying that the electrons that make up the current could squeeze through the pinch points collectively rather than passing through them individually.

Electrons behave like quantum waves

In the new work, Eli Zeldov, together with Levitov and colleagues from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science and the University of Colorado at Denver in the US, studied electrons in tungsten ditelluride (WTe2). This material is an ultraclean type II Weyl semimetal, a recently discovered class of topological material (one that can be insulating in the bulk but has conducting surface states due to symmetry-protected topological order). WTe2 is known to have exotic electronic properties when made into two-dimensional flakes a single atom thick. Indeed, it is one of several new quantum materials in which electrons interact strongly and behave as quantum waves rather than particles, Levitov explains.

To observe electrons flowing in vortices, the researchers first synthesized pure single crystals of WTe2 and shaved off thin flakes of the material. They then used electron-beam lithography and plasma etching to pattern each flake into a narrow channel and two circular chambers connected to its sides.
“This geometry was designed to allow possible shear forces to steer the electron fluid in the chambers by the electric current flowing in the narrow channel,” team member Amit Aharon-Steinberg tells Physics World. “We then used an extremely sensitive scanning magnetometer, designed in our laboratory, which senses the magnetic fields generated by the flowing electric current.”

Finally, the researchers reconstructed the electric current from the measured magnetic field images to explicitly highlight the vortices.

The hydrodynamic regime

The analyses revealed that electrons flowing through the channel caused the electrons in each side chamber to swirl in whirlpools. What is more, the vortices were only present for small apertures, with the flow being laminar (that is, without vortices) for larger ones. Near the vortical-to-laminar transition, a single vortex in the chamber was seen splitting into two – behaviour that is only expected in the hydrodynamic (fluid-like) regime.

The findings suggest that a new hydrodynamic mechanism in thin pure crystals may exist such that the diffusion of the momentum of electrons is enabled by small-angle scattering on the surface of the material rather than conventional electron-electron scattering, which becomes very weak at low temperatures. This surface-induced para-hydrodynamics, as the researchers have dubbed it, shares many of aspects of ordinary hydrodynamics, including vortices.

According to the Weizmann-MIT-Colorado team, the findings could help researchers design and develop more efficient electronics. “We know when electrons go in a fluid state, [energy] dissipation drops, and that’s of interest in trying to design low-power electronics,” Levitov says. “This new observation is another step in that direction.”

The research is detailed in Nature.

Source

"Xe" is the graphics architecture brand that Intel introduced with its 11th Gen Tiger Lake chips, and it has continued releasing updates to Xe since then. The upcoming Arc discrete graphics, for example, is based on the Xe HPG variation.

Here is what the company writes on its bulletin which clarifies DirectX 9 support on existing and upcoming Intel products:

12th generation Intel processor's integrated GPU and Arc discrete GPU no longer support D3D9 natively. Applications and games based on DirectX 9 can still work through Microsoft* D3D9On12 interface.

The integrated GPU on 11th generation and older Intel processors supports DX9 natively, but they can be combined with Arc graphics cards. If so, rendering is likely to be handled by the card and not the iGPU (unless the card is disabled). Thus, the system will be using DX9On12 instead of DX9.

Although Intel does not explicitly state that its upcoming 13th Gen Raptor Lake graphics will lack native DX9 support, the scenario seems pretty certain as Raptor Lake is also expected to be based on the Xe LP architecture. Meanwhile, the14th Gen Meteor Lake family allegedly features a new Xe LPG design.

Source: Intel

Intel confirms no native DirectX 9 support for 13th Gen Raptor Lake, Arc, and more

However, it looks like the former is not done with launching previous generation cards yet as Nvidia is allegedly preparing to resume the production and supply of its RTX 3080 12GB model. The report comes from Twitter user @Zed_Wang.

Wang said around a couple of months ago that Team Green was halting the production of the 3080 12GB variant since there was not much a price difference between the 3080 Ti and the 12GB 3080, despite the latter being somewhat slower.

Here is quick recap of the specifications of Nvidia's GPUs that are based on the GA102 die. In total, there are five GPUs that Nvidia has released so far.

The report says that there is an abundance of GPUs ever since the crash of mining boom. Hence, there is a lot of unsold GA102-based GPU inventory which the company is trying to get rid off. What this could potentially mean for buyers is even lower prices for powerful hardware.

Via: Hardware Times

With RTX 4000 launch looming, Nvidia allegedly resumes RTX 3080 12GB production

Intel turns to code translation to run old DirectX9 games on its newest GPUs

Stray is an exceptional game. It not only combines the greatness of various other masterpieces, but creates a unique experience that will be remembered for a very long time.

The gaming world has gone crazy with a new game called Stray. For a good reason, too. After-all, it’s a game based on a cat. The protagonist is a cat and it allows the player to play as the cat. So after days of getting tired of the hype, we finally decided to try and do a PC review it. The results were quite good would be an understatement.

Published by Annapurna Interactive, Stray is a game made by a small France based game developers named BlueTwelve Studio. Possibly their first game, it doesn’t look like the game developers are small timers. They seem to be the master of this art.

It’s important to mention that the review will have some spoilers. While we have tried to not reveal any major part of the story, we decided to go with a lengthy review and that means spoilers are inevitable. Still, we promise we will not ruin the story for you.

Cutting to the chase, let’s talk about the game.

Story

The story of the game starts out in a world where our protagonist, the cat, is walking with other cats of its family, over various human created pipelines in a beautifully created natural world with vegetation all around. The fun is cut short when our cat fells down into an underground world, with the other cats in the family not able to do anything to stop it. What follows is the start of our cat’s journey to try to reach back to the top again.

In between, our cat meets a memorable tiny robot drone-like companion called B-12 (presumably named after the developers BlueTwelve) and other humanoid robots who are either eager to get out of the underground world or have hopelessly given up. The story of the game will make you fall in love with each of the main characters, from the companion B-12 to other humanoid robots.

The story raises questions about where the humans have gone. Why is everyone trapped underground. Why are all the calendars stuck on 11th October. It tries to answer these questions as the game progresses.

There are two major villains in the game. First the Zurks, which seems to be directly inspired by the Headcrabs from the Half-Life game series. They come in huge groups and attack and latch onto the cat and the player needs to either run from them or get rid of them quickly. The Zurks are found only in the first half of the game. The second villains in the game are police drones called the Sentinels. These Sentinels, if they detect you as a threat, will shoot and murder you in no time, requiring you to play very stealthily to avoid them.

Coming back to the game itself. The majority of the game sets out in two cities. The first being slums where the player has to talk and help various people to go further. The second part of the game sets out in the city called the Midtown, which allows one to find more help to reach the top further.

In between comes various challenges and villains trying to stop you. This includes a scary middle part of the game called Sewers, which makes the game into a scary nightmare to play. But is still an important part of the story of the game. In middle also comes a beautiful place called the Antvillage, which is a village on a huge tree.

An important point should be made about our companion B-12. The story of B-12 is important to the game itself. It has forgotten its memories and we must explore various places to find help him remember them. Overall, it is trying it’s best to help our cat reach to the top again. The story of B-12 is great and extremely memorable. Our companion B-12 is all set to become one of the greatest companions in the history of gaming.

It must be mentioned that the story has a bitter-sweet conclusion and leaves many questions, left to be answered in a possible sequel, becoming Stray 2. But take nothing away from the game itself. The story does reach a meaningful conclusion and it’s completely worth playing for. Really, the story of the game is keeps you engage and the conclusion will leave most people emotional. We insist everyone to play it to feel it yourself.

Stray’s story, in many ways, also reminds us of Portal 2’s story. Now Portal 2 is considered among the greatest game ever made and being compared to it in any way is no small feat in itself.

Story rating: 4.5/5.

Gameplay

The gameplay of the Stray allows one to control our protagonist, the cat. You jump onto pipes, rooftops, walk to the allies, run through the dangerous areas to reach the places you want, in order to progress in the game. The game is not an open world sandbox, but a linear game with allows one to roam only areas allowed by the developers – this includes the pipes, which are easy to walk on and falling from them is (nearly) impossible. Even then, the cities leave open a vast amount of areas, free to roam and explore.

In the midst of all the running and jumping, you talk to the humanoid robots who speak an alien robot-only language, which our trusty robot drone companion translates with ease. You got to find ways to help these robots, who in return help you reach further.

Really, we are quite unsure what genre to put this game into. Sometimes it becomes an action-adventure game. At times, it’s a 3D platformer. Many times, it’s a calm puzzle adventure. Another time it becomes a horror game. What’s great is that it does well in almost all of these.

All these things make the gameplay exceptional. You are unlikely to find any game similar to this one.

We had two major and one small problems with the gameplay. The Zurks and the Sentinels being the first major one.

The Zurks are ruthless creatures. They will come in groups and murder our cat in no time. There’s no easy way to kill them, either. One has to keep mewing in order to rid of the Zurks latched onto the cat. The mewing part is extremely hard to do when one plays the game with a keyboard and the mouse. While the developers recommend playing with a gamepad, it’s optional and keyboard and mouse is largely good to use, except this part.

The good news is that the keys are bind-able and can be changed in any way one wants. Someone recommended the mewing key be changed from the default left-Alt button on the keyboard to the left mouse button and it makes the game far easier to play.

The ruthlessness of Zurks cannot be stated enough. Especially so in the sewer levels, where it basically becomes a horror game. You cannot even shoot them in most part of the game. Thankfully, the game has divided itself into safe and unsafe zones. This is where the game also excels. How it transitions from tense areas to calm ones. It tells you this is a safe zone where there are no Zurks – like cities which are calm and fun and there are unsafe zones which are full of these creatures – where one has to run quickly.

The Sentinels are relatively easy to deal with. But they are so quick to shoot, something that makes the game end in no time. If caught in their pre-determined roaming areas and sight, they will quickly shoot the cat in no time. Even if one presses the run button and maneuvers in the location, it hardly leaves any time in the hands to get away from them easily.

It’s nothing new for the bad guys to be hard to play against in a game. However, the problem we have is that the game attracts a lot of casual players thanks to its subject and game makes it really hard to play against these two enemies. What we would have ideally liked is for the game to have difficulty modes, with easy, medium and hard mode as an option. With easy mode allowing Zurks and Sentinels to take more time to detect and latch onto the cat and if possible, be lesser in numbers too (at least the Zurks).

The second major problem we have is again slightly related to the difficulty of the game. There is no manual saving in this game. Only automatic saves are allowed in the game. That too one single slot. Which makes it even harder. As it requires one to try again and again. Which is frustrating for casual players who just want to play as a cat while their cats are watching them play on the screen. Another problem with lack of an ability to manually save is that there are possibilities of the save file being corrupted.

Thankfully, the game, which is spread into 12 different chapters, allows one to start from any chapter they like, but from the very start of those chapters. Selecting these chapters is completely optional and has nothing to do with the auto-saved file – unless one loads those chapters.

Another small quip we have is the camera. Hiding from the Sentinels requires one to hide in boxes. Not a big issue. But the camera angles when the cat is inside the box makes it really harder for us to see where these Sentinels have gone. This camera movement needs an improvement. There is an option in the game settings to disable auto camera, but we didn’t try them.

But taking nothing away from the game. Except the above-mentioned problems, it’s really a great game.

We would like to mention a small feature, just to explain the greatness of this game. When the cat walks on various surfaces like the sofa, its speed slows down a little. It’s possible that the game also vibrates the gamepad controller, but we haven’t checked.

Another memorable part of this game is that it allows the cat to scratch sofas and carpets, mew at will – during the gameplay and cut-screens and even purr near some humanoid robots. It reminds one what this game is all about – the cat. Really, the level of attention paid to the small areas is exceptional.

We found almost no bugs while playing this game. Which too is a great feat.

Some people also complain that the game is too short. We did not think so. We took 8 hours 10 mins to complete it. Maybe people complain because they wanted more, which is not a wrong thing to feel.

Gameplay rating: 4/5

Graphics Design

This is what we were waiting for. The graphics of Stray is extraordinary. It’s not a surprise as Unreal Engine is used to make this game. But it’s the effort which has gone behind making it.

The cities are designed with attention to the smallest of details. The slums have been designed after a now demolished real life place called Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. Really. With all the garbage lying around, you wonder how did the developers manage to create such a beauty in such a dirt. It’s really a marvel.

If you were impressed with the Slums, then Midtown city takes it further. It’s a city full of neon lights akin to the Cyberpunk location. What impressive is how realistic some portrayals are. One room in particular of our robot friend is designed mindbogglingly beautiful.

Even the horror inducing sewers were beautifully designed. The graphical design of the sewers makes it simply clear that a good amount of efforts was put into designing the game. One has to play it to understand that the efforts required to make sewers the horror they are.

What’s also impressive is how our hero, the cat was designed. It’s movement, its actions, its licking of paws, its curling up, its purring, all resembled real life cats. This is because the cat of the game was designed on real life cats of the developers.

Really, the people who designed this game are artists. We would wonder what level of graphical design they would have made had they were given even higher budget.

The graphics settings offer many options. Fullscreen mode, Resolution, Resolution Scale, V-Sync, Motion Blur (something not found in all games), Sharpness slider, Effects Quality, Shadow Quality, Mesh Quality. In all, simple, yet effective options.

Graphics rating: 5/5

Audio

I don’t know if others have mentioned, but there are no human voice-over lines in this game. Our cat doesn’t understand the robot or human language. Everything is translated by B-12 and written in hovering dialog box which one needs to read. Yes, the robots do make impressive sounds, but they aren’t proper words.

The game however makes something even better than human voice-over lines. It has cat voice-over lines. Twitter user and musician JANKENPOPP reports that the cat voice was recorded by a real life cat named Lala. Which does a more than impressive job. From mewing, to getting hurt a little, to purring, to being annoyed and angry. The game captures the voice of the real cat perfectly.

What’s also impressive is the music. While some areas of the game has a radio or a tape-recorder running in the background. What the game excels is the music during the unsafe areas. The music in the sewer parts, for example, has an award for best musical score written all over it. The music is still in our ears, that’s how impressive it has been.

Audio rating: 5/5

Performance

When we review a PC game, it is important to review its performance. As no PC game review is complete without one. We used a decently powerful budget PC with a relatively ancient graphics card to play this game.

The graphics settings of Stray allows limited but good amount of options to navigate. It allows one to play in fullscreen exclusive or other modes. The game also allows one to have an uncapped frame rate or cap it at 60 FPS. We chose the second.

The performance of Stray on 1080p was top-notch. In almost no point of time did we feel that the FPS dropped below 60. It did not glitch during the sewers and did not have any problems during the vast cites either.

What we felt was that the game was graphics card heavy and did not use the CPU above maybe 20%. This graphics card heavy engine, we feel, is a specialty of Unreal Engine. This is completely different from Ubisoft’s Anvil engine, which feels very CPU heavy.

In all, the performance of this game on PC is quite good and overall quite smooth.

Performance rating: 5/5

Conclusion

Stray is a masterpiece. Let there be no doubt about it. It may have been made by a small studio, but people and their cats have big abilities. The story of the game will pull you inside it. The gameplay will make the game feel like the back of your hand (except unsafe parts). The graphics are beautiful and immersive. The audio is memorable. The performance is impressive.

Stray is an exceptional game. It not only combines the greatness of various other masterpieces, but creates a unique experience that will be remembered for a long time. Easily one of the best games ever created. The game will make you remember the cat and B-12 – it’s companion forever, in this meaningful journey and emotional conclusion of the game.

Easily a game which is going to run away with many awards, possibly Game Of The Year (GOTY) awards included into it.

PC gamers can buy Stray from Steam. We fully recommend to play it.

Game rating: 4.5/5.

Review: Stray – When Portal and Half-Life Meets Cyberpunk

Patch Tuesday

This week hosted the second Tuesday of the month, which means that it was Patch Tuesday week for Windows users. As always, cumulative updates featuring patches and security fixes were rolled out for supported versions of Microsoft's operating systems.

Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 received KB5016679 and KB5016683, respectively. The improvements between them are shared as both fix issues in troubleshooters and Local Security Authority Server Service (LSASS). Interestingly though, Windows 7 contains known issues but Windows 8.1 does not. It is important to note that Windows 7 Patch Tuesday updates are now only offered to those paying for extended security update (ESU).

Meanwhile, Windows 10 netted KB5016616 that fixes some printing and security issues. There are three known problems in this build to be aware of too, but Microsoft has offered mitigations for each of them.

In the same vein, Windows 11 received KB5016629 with some security patches and general improvements. There is one known issue applicable to IT admins, so those interested can check it out here. Interestingly enough, Windows 11 Release Preview Insiders with version 22H2 were also offered the same update.

Patch Tuesday isn't all that was offered to Windows devices, though. Windows 11 Dev Channel Insiders got build 25179 which brings tabbed File Explorer for all, input enhancements, and even ISOs. That said, those who prefer ISO installations should know that downloading Windows ISOs from Fido scripts in Rufus no longer appears to be possible. In fact, the developer is seeking help from others in the matter.

But going back to the topic of Insider rollouts, Windows 11 Beta Channel Insiders got their hands on builds 22621.575 and build 22622.575. As has been the case lately, the former comes with certain new features disabled by default while the latter has them toggled on. You can find both changelogs here.

It's also worth noting that build 25179 was also released for Windows Server vNext users. As usual, there is no changelog, but there is one known issue that IT admins should be aware of.

A new Outlook

Microsoft has announced that after testing via an opt-in experience with a subset of users for the past few months, it is now ready to move Outlook apps to a new location for everyone soon. Rather than showing them horizontally below folders, Microsoft will be moving them to the left navigation panel. According to the company, this will offer vertical space to fit more apps and will result in a consistent design. The immediate user feedback has been mixed, to say the least.

Oh, and speaking of Outlook, Microsoft has confirmed that there is an issue in Outlook Desktop which results in frequent crashes. While the firm investigates the issue, it has offered some workarounds.

After a bunch of contradictory statements, Microsoft finally confirmed this week that Microsoft 365 access is not being cut off for Office 2016 and 2019 next year after all. While the customers in this space might encounter degraded experiences in this space after October 2023, their access won't be blocked.

And coming over to smaller app updates, Office for iOS 2.64 Beta received text highlighting improvements in PowerPoint, new functions in Excel, and Scribble support. Meanwhile, Skype Insider version 8.88.76.100 netted improved message quoting and a bunch of bug fixes. And it appears that Microsoft PowerToys is getting a new Screen Ruler tool pretty soon, have a look here.

Vulnerabilities, bugs, and issues, oh my!

This week, we learned that a lot of Windows 11 and Windows Server CPUs containing Vectorized AES (VAES) instruction are susceptible to "data damage". Although Microsoft has also rolled out patches, it has noted that you may experience performance degradation with regards to BitLocker, TLS in load balancers, and disk throughput for a period of one month after installing the updates. AES-based operations may be slower by a factor of two as well. You can find out the scope of the problem and affected CPUs here.

Another interesting bug disclosed by a Microsoft employee themselves is that the Microsoft Store could apparently not display a count of more than 2,000 reviews. Although this odd cap has now been removed, the Principal Architect lead of the Microsoft Store Rudy Huyn hasn't revealed why it existed in the first place.

Furthermore, those using Windows 8.1 through Windows 11 might experience problems installing the Security update for Secure Boot DBX. The update will fail to install with error code 0x800f0922 and while Microsoft is investigating the issue, it has suggested updating the UEFI BIOS.

In more news related to bugs, Microsoft has also notified Windows 10 and 11 users of problems when opening XPS documents. Besides the inability to open XPS and OXPS documents in non-English languages, XPS Viewer stops responding and starts hogging CPU and RAM resources until it crashes upon reaching 2.5GB of RAM usage. This has apparently been happening since the June 2022 and Microsoft is now actively working to resolve it.

In some pieces of good news, Microsoft is finally fixing weather accuracy in Windows Widgets. This has been cited as a problem by tons of users recently, and it's good to know that the company is finally active on this front. Furthermore, August's Patch Tuesday has also resolved the Secure Boot GRUB vulnerability, find out all the details here.

Git gud

We'll start this section off with some news about Microsoft accusing Sony of paying off developers to stop games from landing on Xbox Game Pass. On the other hand, Sony cited concerns that a successful acquisition of Activision Blizzard could lead to players abandoning PlayStation consoles in favor of Xbox. These revelations are just the latest in Microsoft's ongoing and massive $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

In more enterprise gaming news, Unity has tapped Microsoft as its cloud partner as the two leverage from Azure to allow developers to build more compelling real-time 3D experiences. Customers of Parallels Desktop will be pleased to know that version 18 of the virtualization software brings tons of gaming improvements too. Furthermore, yet another video of the alleged two-toned white and black Xbox Elite Controller Series 2 has surfaced, but the jury is still out on when Microsoft will officially unveil it.

Meanwhile, those on the lookout for sales should take a gander at the Xbox Ultimate Add-on Sale headlined by Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty. And those who have a preference for PC gaming should check out our weekend deals, personally curated by News Editor Pulasthi Ariyasinghe.

Dev Channel

• Download some pretty Windows 365 wallpapers right here!
• ARM64EC now fully supports Windows 11
• Microsoft has laid off its Modern Life Experiences (MLX) team - this department was built several years ago to research and develop customer-focused products
• Visual Studio 2022 version 17.3 is now live
• Microsoft has highlighted six new digital transitions in industries looking to adopt IoT
• Surface Duo and Duo 2 have received firmware updates with video calls quality improvements

Under the spotlight

As he does every week, forum member Adam Bottjen - also known as "Warwagon" in the forums - published his Tech Tips Tuesday article where he introduced some of our readers to a nifty way to locate desktop icons with ease.

Meanwhile, News Reporter Taras Buria wrote a guide on how you can enable a new taskbar animation in Windows 11 Dev Channel build 25179. Although it doesn't add utility, some might like it for its aesthetics.

I published two companion editorials on the topic of Windows 11. The first was about the top five smaller features that I really like in Windows 11, you can read it here.

On the other hand, the second piece went in the opposite direction and I talked about the five relatively minor things that I dislike in Windows 11.

Since tabbed File Explorer is now available for everyone in the Windows 11 Dev Channel, I also thought that it would be fun to discuss my personal thoughts on how Microsoft can truly take advantage of this interface, read my views here.

Finally, our resident reviewer Christopher White argued that Amazon's $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot isn't really about spying on you, despite what some online fearmongering would have you believe. You can check out Christopher's thoughts on the topic here.

Logging off

Our most interesting piece of news this week relates to Telegram CEO Paul Durov slamming Apple for blocking the company's app update for two weeks just because it doesn't want Telemoji on its platform. If you're unsure what the term means, it's basically a new take on conventional emoji and an attempt to breathe new life into them by animating them through high-quality vectorized versions. It's unclear why Apple is on the warpath against Telemoji, but it has requested Durov to remove the specific capability from Telegram.

Microsoft Weekly: Patch Tuesday, Outlook, and bugs

YouTube is building a system that would allow users to subscribe to streaming services through the YouTube app, The Wall Street Journal reported, and could launch the so-called “channel store” as early as this fall. The Journal’s report didn’t say which services might be part of the store, only that YouTube has been talking with various entertainment companies.

A channel store makes perfect sense for YouTube, and it’s been a long time in the works: The Information reported on a similar plan way back in early 2020. More recently, the company has been signaling this is coming: “I think whether content is distributed in a bundle, or where over time we explore other ways of distributing it, I think YouTube can be a great partner there,” YouTube VP of product management Christian Oestlien recently told The Verge. “We’ve never looked at the world as these binary choices between us and partner services... we think all of us can coexist in a really healthy way.”

This is now maybe the single most popular idea in the streaming business. Tech companies, particularly those who have tried to make their own original content and seen how hard (and expensive!) it is to do so, are deciding they’re better off handling everything but the shows and movies. You already have an account with Verizon or AT&T, for instance, and a bill you pay them every month, so your carrier can pitch itself as a valuable marketing partner and infrastructure provider for subscriptions. It’s a lot like the old cable bundle, just... internet-ified. And the upside is the same for app store providers and game stores: a small cut of everything you buy.

Apple, Amazon, and a number of others all make this case, and often to great effect. HBO Max got 4.5 million subscribers through Amazon Channels, the Journal reported, and briefly bailed on that partnership but is now reportedly planning to come back. Even Walmart is reportedly thinking about getting in the game.

YouTube may have the strongest case of any channel store partner, though. It has an enormous audience, upwards of two billion people a month, many of whom already have an account and a credit card saved to YouTube. They already have the app downloaded, they might even already be watching Peacock or HBO shows one clip at a time — it’s an easy upsell to get them subscribed to the service. (YouTube also has the best video player and app on the market, which doesn’t hurt its case to users.)

YouTube even has some of this platform already built out. YouTube TV is to some extent already a channel store; you can subscribe to HBO Max, Starz, Showtime and other channels and services right from within the YouTube TV interface. You can buy and rent movies directly on YouTube, too, and watch some things for free. More recently, code in the Google TV app suggests that 50 free TV channels are coming to the platform.

To some extent, this also feels like a final admission that YouTube can’t compete head-on with the Netflixes and HBOs of the world. The company has long looked for ways to make and offer more premium content, including a handful of ill-fated attempts at making TV-style original content. (RIP, YouTube Originals.) YouTube is already the go-to place for clips and highlights of TV shows and movies, but hasn’t found great ways to integrate premium Hollywood content onto the platform.

To make this work, YouTube will have to convince streaming services that it’s not a long-term threat to their business; YouTube’s relationship with Hollywood has improved over the years, but many entertainment companies still view it as both a partner and a necessary evil. Even though Apple and Amazon have competitive services, they don’t represent the existential, paradigm-shifting threat to the TV and movie industry that YouTube does. How the Peacocks and Paramount Pluses of the world will weigh the value of YouTube’s massive audience versus the competitive pull of its content will go a long way toward deciding whether YouTube can be the channel store it hopes to be.

Everybody’s going to want to be the channel store going forward — it’s the app store model all over again, and there’s a lot of money at stake. But if YouTube can pull it off, it might be even more than that. A YouTube app with all your streaming shows and movies, everything to buy and rent, plus all the creators you love and the search engine that underpins it all? That would be the most powerful app in entertainment, and it wouldn’t even be close.

Channel stores are officially the hottest new thing in streaming

WhenWhen the Tidbyt, which its creators describe as a “personal pixel display,” arrived at my house, I liked it before I even knew what to do with it. With its walnut paneling and its ultra-pixelated display, it kind of looks like what would happen if you asked someone in 1956 to design an Echo Show for Amazon. It’s 8.2 inches long, 4.4 inches tall, and two inches deep, which is a little big to put on your bedside table but nestles nicely into a bookshelf or on a larger desk. It’s an impressively well-made thing for a company’s first product.

But the thing about the $179 Tidbyt is that it never really becomes obvious what this device is for. It’s a clock but not an alarm clock. It’s a hilariously bad digital photo frame. It doesn’t do anything your phone can’t, and your phone definitely does all those things better. It’s an excellent delivery system for quick bits of ambient information, but if that doesn’t immediately mean anything to you, you don’t need a Tidbyt. Its charm is real and still hasn’t worn off on me, but it still feels a bit unfinished.

The team behind Tidbyt started working on this a couple of years ago and launched the product on Kickstarter in March 2021. A year and a half later, all the backers have received their Tidbyts, and the device is generally available. Sort of: co-founder Rohan Singh tells me the current supply is sold out, but “we have more units on the way in a couple of weeks.” Manufacturing is hard, but Singh is confident Tidbyt can stay on top of things.

There are plenty of hints that Tidbyt is still new at this, though. For starters, my device arrived with an Anker-branded charging cable in the box along with a black wall plug that clearly came out of a bin somewhere in a factory in China. Neither of those bothers me, really — and at least the cable is one of those nice braided ones — but an Apple-like unboxing experience this is not.

The screen is the whole point of Tidbyt, though, and it’s a very unusual one. It’s not a screen so much as a collection of individual LEDs — 64 across by 32 down, 2,048 of them in all — that can be lit up and controlled individually. You can control the display’s brightness, and it can get seriously bright; I kept the brightness level at about 15 out of 100, and at full strength, those 2,048 LEDs were bright enough that the Tidbyt lit my home office practically by itself.

It’s incredibly low-res by design because it’s not meant to do very much. The Tidbyt’s makers aren’t trying to build a super immersive gadget but, rather, something that can keep you from needing to look at your phone every time you need a tiny bit of information. Singh says that he built the original prototype as a way to quickly find out when the subway was coming. “If I got on my phone to check,” he says, “then I would also check Twitter. And I would check Instagram and stuff, and then just be doing that for, like, half an hour.” Instead, he hacked together a thing that plugged into the New York City’s subway API and told him when the next G train was arriving. It looks like a subway status board because that’s exactly what it is.

There’s a whole genre of gadgets out there that all pitch themselves this way, of course. “This is the gadget that will free you from your phone” applies to everything from the Apple Watch and Alexa to the minimalist smartphones from Palm and others. Tidbyt just takes the idea to its extreme by not letting you interact with the device at all.

To set up the Tidbyt, you just plug it in. It turns on automatically and jumps into pairing mode. All the actual work happens in the Tidbyt app, which is available on Android and iOS: you connect to the Tidbyt via Bluetooth then log it into your Wi-Fi network and it’s up and running. The app is where you decide what the Tidbyt will do, how bright it gets, and everything else. It does defeat the whole “don’t use your phone” idea a bit, but once the Tidbyt is set up the way you like it, you don’t really need the app anymore.

As for getting stuff on the Tidbyt, that happens in the app as well. There’s a store with a few dozen different apps, all of them free, which you can install on your device in a couple of taps. Most are status boards of some kind: there are lots of different clocks, a bunch of weather apps, ways to track the stock market or the price of Bitcoin or the phase of the Moon, some sports score apps that scroll like the ESPN ticker, and plenty of ways to see when the next subway train is coming. There are a few silly apps, too, like a Nyan Cat animation or a recreation of the bouncing DVD logo that I am not ashamed to admit I watched for about 20 straight minutes just to see if it would ever hit the corner. (It did, and it was awesome.)

More apps are coming to Tidbyt all the time, but it’s still pretty basic. There’s no calendar app that works for Outlook or iCloud, for instance, nor is there a way to see most to-do lists other than from Todoist or Things. Building an app for Tidbyt is fairly straightforward — it’s just a bunch of lights, after all, and if you have access to Linux and basic Python knowledge, you can write your own pretty easily. And the Tidbyt team tells me they’d ultimately like the Tidbyt to work more like a no-code platform for anyone to create custom apps. That’s still a ways off, though, and for now, there are big holes in the app store.

It’s easy enough to add apps to your Tidbyt, but I wish I could do more to manage them. By default, the Tidbyt rotates through all the apps you’ve installed, displaying each one for 15 seconds at a time. You can drag the apps around to determine the order in which they show up, and you can shorten the switching time down to as little as five seconds, but you can’t make it any longer — and I want it to be longer. More than that, what I want is a way to freeze it on a single app, kind of like hitting “hold” on a thermostat to keep it at one temperature rather than running the normal schedule. You can technically schedule when apps do and don’t run, so you can kind of reverse engineer this setup, but it’s a lot more work than it should be.

Without this kind of control, you’ll really only want to add apps to the Tidbyt that you plan to use all the time. I ride the DC metro sometimes but not daily, and it got annoying constantly looking at the schedule on days I didn’t care. Nyan Cat was funny — but not enough to look at once a minute 24 hours a day.

In my whole time using the Tidbyt, I’ve vacillated constantly between appreciating how little it does and wishing it would do just a tiny bit more. It’s a great-looking desk clock and, with a speaker, would be a great alarm — but I don’t really want this thing shouting at me all day. It’d be nice to be able to scroll through my apps manually, but I also don’t want to turn my Tidbyt into a thing I have to walk over and interact with.

Here’s where I landed: a button. I wish the Tidbyt had one, single, customizable, smackable button on the top. That button could be totally programmable — both the hardware and the software are easy to pull apart and tinker with, which Singh told me is a key part of its purpose — but I’d use it just as a way to stop and start the Tidbyt’s app rotation: one smack to freeze it on whatever app is currently showing so I can just have the clock and forecast showing most of the time, another smack to start it cycling between everything I have installed.

I don’t think I’m getting my button anytime soon, but the Tidbyt team is working on some more controls for the software. “Right now, it’s definitely limited,” Singh says, “but it’s simple. It’s very predictable. There’s a lot of things we can do, like add scheduling, or allow you to hold an app or change the amount of time one app is displayed — the question is how to do that and give you a user experience that makes sense.” The whole point of the Tidbyt, he says, is that you don’t have to use it for it to be useful, and he doesn’t want to lose that.

The other thing missing from Tidbyt right now is multiuser support. For a device that’s likely to be placed around people’s homes, the fact that you can only control it from a single phone is a problem. The team says it’s working on that, too, as well as better controls for homes with multiple Tidbyts.

After a few days of playing around with all the Tidbyt apps, I ended up keeping just three: one shows the forecast; one shows the next event on my calendar; and one is a delightfully pixelated picture of my two dogs. The Tidbyt flips between them every 15 seconds.

As a result, my Tidbyt is basically a super-powered desk clock. $179 is an awful lot to pay for a super-powered desk clock, of course, and it doesn’t offer anything you can’t get with a quick glance at your phone. It also offers a lot less than you’d get from a smart display from Google or Amazon, many of which you can find much cheaper. But I like the idea of these light, ambient gadgets, which have information I need but don’t thrust it in my face with push notifications or try to lure me into doomscrolling every time I look. I like what the Tidbyt represents even more than I like the device itself. I don’t even want it to do more stuff! I just want to control it better.

Photography by David Pierce / The Verge

This customizable smart display is a fun desk accessory in need of a purpose

AI software capable of mapping tumor tissue more accurately to help surgeons treat and shrink prostate cancer using a laser-powered needle will soon be tested in real patients during clinical trials.

The National Cancer Institute estimated that approximately 12.6 percent of men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their life. The risk for developing the disease rises over time for men over the age of 50. It's one of the most curable forms of cancer, considering most cases are caught in the early stages due to regular screening tests.

Treatment for prostate cancer varies depending on the severity of the disease. Patients can undergo hormone therapy, chemotherapy, or surgery to remove tissue. Avenda Health, a medical startup founded in 2017, is developing a new type of treatment that is less invasive. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted an investigational device exemption (IDE) to the company's invention this week, meaning it can now be used in a clinical study.

Patients will need to have an MRI scan and a targeted fusion biopsy performed first. The data is processed by Avenda's AI algorithms in its iQuest software to map where the cancerous cells are located within the prostate. Next, the computer vision-aided model will simulate where best to insert FocalPoint, a probe armed with a laser, to help surgeons treat the patient's tumor. The heat from the laser gently heats the cancerous cells and kills them with goal of shrinking and removing the whole tumor.

MRI images where cancer is mapped using iQuest software before and after treatment. Image Credit: Avenda Health

"Historically, prostate cancer treatments of surgery or radiation impacts critical structures like the urethra and nerves which control sexual and urinary function," Avenda's CEO and co-founder Shyam Natarajan told The Register. "Our focal laser ablation system, FocalPoint, which is powered by our AI-driven cancer margin software, iQuest, specifically targets tumor tissue and avoids healthy tissue. This means patients no longer lose control over these functions that are so common with traditional treatments, so quality of life is significantly improved."

The treatment is only effective for men diagnosed with intermediate risk of prostate cancer, a classification that describes tumors being confined within the prostate only. Patients are considered high risk in cases where the cancer has spread beyond the prostate.

"This is one of the benefits of the iQuest software. Not only can it map the cancer, but it also provides decision support for the physician as they determine the best course of treatment for an individual patient. Not every patient is going to be eligible for focal therapy, and it is important for the physician to distinguish between good focal therapy candidates and not. iQuest provides useful insights for that decision making process," Natarajan said.

Avenda received FDA clearance for its FocalPoint device in 2020. The IDE approval brings the company one step closer to bringing their product to market after clinical trial testing, Brittany Berry-Pusey, co-founder and COO of Avenda, said in a statement.

"This clinical trial will play a key role in advancing our breakthrough technology to improve prostate cancer care. With no new FDA approvals for the treatment of localized prostate cancer in more than four decades, we look forward to working alongside our clinical sites to collect the data necessary to bring iQuest and FocalPoint to market and into the patient care environment."

Natarajan told us the company was aiming to begin clinical trials in 2023. ®

Source

Epson’s bricked printers highlight the industry’s reparability problem

Manufacturers have also been more enthusiastically slashing prices and low-priced chips have been available in the spot market, leaving other suppliers no choice but to follow suit.

The estimation posted is that the Q3 decline will move from the original figure of 8-13% to a larger cut of 13-18%, which will continue into Q4 with a revised estimate of a 3-8% reduction (from an original estimate of 0-5%). As the best case for consumers, this would be equivalent to a 26% price cut by the end of the year compared to current figures.

Previously with DDR3, pricing went to a high point due to aggressive pricing strategies adopted by the manufacturers in Korea, which resulted in a maximum increase of approximately 60% compared to the lowest point. But as memory manufacturers move over to DDR4 production from DDR3 as demand switches, prices will continue to fall in the future.

Source: TrendForce

Good news everyone, the price of RAM is expected to fall

Anker launched a new $149.99 portable PowerCore 24K GaN charger housing a big 24,000mAh battery for you to carry around, which is capable of being fast charged at 140W but can also dish out power at the same rate (via 9to5Toys). That’s powerful enough to charge a 16-inch MacBook Pro to 50 percent in 40 minutes, assuming you’re using the MagSafe to USB-C cable.

The PowerCore is equipped with the new Power Delivery 3.1 specification that can pump more than the previous maximum of 100W from a single USB-C port. Anker’s new battery bank can pump 140W of power out of either of the two USB-C ports, and there’s also one USB-A port capable of 18W charging.

PowerCore also includes features from Anker’s set of new “GaNPrime” chargers introduced last month based on the high-powered GaN 3-based tech. GaNPrime chargers promise improvements in AC-to-DC conversion efficiency, more total power output, and better temperature sensing, all in a slightly smaller package.

The other chargers that Anker just released aren’t capable of PD 3.1, including the new Anker 747 GaNPrime, which is capable of 150W of charging; however, each single port can still only output 100W max.

A standout feature of the PowerCore 24K is its smart display, which gives info like power draw for each connected device, how much power is left in the tank, and recharge time. The screen does draw 0.36W of power, so Anker recommends keeping it off when not in use, according to the product FAQs.

The Anker PowerCore 24K is available now on Amazon and directly from Anker for $149.99. It doesn’t come with a USB-C cable or AC charger in the box, so you’ll have to supply your own, and both will need to be capable of PD 3.1 if you’re interested in taking full advantage of the PowerCore 24K’s 140W input / output.

Anker’s new 24,000mAh portable battery can fast charge a 16-inch MacBook Pro

Robert Sansone is a natural born engineer. From animatronic hands to high-speed running boots and a go-kart that can reach speeds of more than 70 miles per hour, the Fort Pierce, Florida-based inventor estimates he’s completed at least 60 engineering projects in his spare time. And he’s only 17 years old.

A couple years ago, Sansone came across a video about the advantages and disadvantages of electric cars. The video explained that most electric car motors require magnets made from rare-earth elements, which can be costly, both financially and environmentally, to extract. The rare-earth materials needed can cost hundreds of dollars per kilogram. In comparison, copper is worth $7.83 per kilogram.

“I have a natural interest in electric motors,” says Sansone, who had used them in different robotics projects. “With that sustainability issue, I wanted to tackle it, and try and design a different motor.”

The highschooler had heard of a type of electric motor—the synchronous reluctance motor—that doesn’t use these rare-earth materials. This kind of motor is currently used for pumps and fans, but it isn’t powerful enough by itself to be used in an electric vehicle. So, Sansone started brainstorming ways he could improve its performance.

Over the course of a year, Sansone created a prototype of a novel synchronous reluctance motor that had greater rotational force—or torque—and efficiency than existing ones. The prototype was made from 3-D printed plastic, copper wires and a steel rotor and tested using a variety of meters to measure power and a laser tachometer to determine the motor’s rotational speed. His work earned him first prize, and $75,000 in winnings, at this year’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), the largest international high school STEM competition.

The less sustainable permanent magnet motors use materials such as neodymium, samarium and dysprosium, which are in high demand because they’re used in many different products, including headphones and earbuds, explains Heath Hofmann, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan. Hofmann has worked extensively on electric vehicles, including consulting with Tesla to develop the control algorithms for its propulsion drive.

“The number of applications that use magnets just seems to be getting larger and larger,” he says. “A lot of the materials are mined in China, and so the price can often depend upon our trade status with China.” Hofmann adds that Tesla recently started using permanent magnets in its motors.

Electric motors use rotating electromagnetic fields to spin a rotor. Coils of wire in the stationary outer portion of the motor, called the stator, produce these electromagnetic fields. In permanent magnet motors, magnets attached to the edge of a spinning rotor produce a magnetic field that is attracted to the opposite poles on the spinning field. This attraction spins the rotor.

Synchronous reluctance motors don’t use magnets. Instead, a steel rotor with air gaps cut into it aligns itself with the rotating magnetic field. Reluctance, or the magnetism of a material, is key to this process. As the rotor spins along with the rotating magnetic field, torque is produced. More torque is produced when the saliency ratio, or difference in magnetism between materials (in this case, the steel and the non-magnetic air gaps), is greater.

Instead of using air gaps, Sansone thought he could incorporate another magnetic field into a motor. This would increase this saliency ratio and, in turn, produce more torque. His design has other components, but he can’t disclose any more details because he hopes to patent the technology in the future.

Sansone’s novel motor outperformed a similarly-designed traditional synchronous reluctance motor in tests of torque and efficiency.

Robert Sansone

“Once I had this initial idea, then I had to do some prototyping to try and see if that design would actually work,” Sansone says. “I don’t have tons of resources for making very advanced motors, and so I had to make a smaller version—a scale model—using a 3-D printer.”

It took several prototypes before he could test his design.

“I didn't have a mentor to help me, really, so each time a motor failed, I had to do tons of research and try and troubleshoot what went wrong,” he says. “But eventually on the 15th motor, I was able to get a working prototype.”

Sansone tested his motor for torque and efficiency, and then reconfigured it to run as a more traditional synchronous reluctance motor for comparison.

He found that his novel design exhibited 39 percent greater torque and 31 percent greater efficiency at 300 revolutions per minute (RPM). At 750 RPM, it performed at 37 percent greater efficiency. He couldn’t test his prototype at higher revolutions per minute because the plastic pieces would overheat—a lesson he learned the hard way when one of the prototypes melted on his desk, he tells Top of the Class, a podcast produced by Crimson Education.
In comparison, Tesla’s Model S motor can reach up to 18,000 RPM, explained the company’s principal motor designer Konstantinos Laskaris in a 2016 interview with Christian Ruoff of the electric vehicles magazine Charged.

Sansone validated his results in a second experiment, in which he “isolated the theoretical principle under which the novel design creates magnetic saliency,” per his project presentation. Essentially, this experiment eliminated all other variables, and confirmed that the improvements in torque and efficiency were correlated with the greater saliency ratio of his design.

“He's definitely looking at things the right way,” Hofmann says of Sansone. “There's the potential that it could be the next big thing.” Though, he adds that many professors work on research their whole lives, and it’s “fairly rare that they end up taking over the world.”

Hofmann says the materials for synchronous reluctance motors are cheap, but the machines are complex and notoriously difficult to manufacture. High manufacturing costs are, therefore, a barrier to their widespread use—and a major limiting factor to Sansone’s invention.

Sansone agrees, but says “with new technologies like additive manufacturing [such as 3-D printing], it would be easier to construct it in the future.”

Sansone is now working on calculations and 3-D modeling for version 16 of his motor, which he plans to build out of sturdier materials so he can test it at higher revolutions per minute. If his motor continues to perform with high speed and efficiency, he says he’ll move forward with the patenting process.

Sansone’s entire experimental setup.

Robert Sansone

As a rising senior at Fort Pierce Central High School, Sansone has dreams of attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His winnings from ISEF will go toward college tuition.

Sansone says he hadn’t originally planned to enter into the competition. But when he learned that one of his classes allowed him to complete a year-long research project and paper on a topic of his choice, he decided to take the opportunity to continue working on his motor.

“I was thinking if I'm able to put this much energy into it, I might as well make it a science fair project and compete with it,” he explains. After doing well at the district and state competitions, he advanced to ISEF.

Sansone is waiting until his next phase of testing before he approaches any car companies, but he hopes that one day his motor will be the design of choice for electric vehicles.

“Rare-earth materials in existing electric motors are a major factor undermining the sustainability of electric vehicles,” he says. “Seeing the day when EVs are fully sustainable due to the help of my novel motor design would be a dream come true.”

Source

A few independent reviewers have already confirmed that and Intel too in Q&A video (via YouTube) recently stated that it's going to be a work in progress in the case of DX11 in most titles.

The company, however, is convinced that the performance of Arc is more than good enough for most people looking to buy a GPU in 2022-23, and it wants to convince you too. As such, today, Intel has shared new benchmark data for the same Arc 750 against the Nvidia RTX 3060. However, now it has included 10 times the titles compared to last time.

First up, we have the 1080p data, both the average framerates as well as the normalized numbers:

Up next, we have the 1440p numbers with two similar charts showing average framerates and normalized:

Furthermore, we have titles that use the Vulkan API at both 1080p and 1440p:

Finally, we have a summary of the entire 50 game test which shows Intel doing slightly better than the RTX 3060.

The charts don't include comparisons with AMD's RX 6600 and 6600 XT, which are competing products. But if we take these numbers as correct - even though these are first-party benchmarks -, then both the Arc A750 and the RTX 3060 should slot right in between the RX 6600 and the RX 6600 XT at 1080p. Meanwhile, at 1440p, where the AMD cards do relatively poorly, the A750 should be right up there with the 6600 XT or even the 6650 XT.

Source: Intel

Intel wants to convince Arc is the real deal, shows off 50 games in DX12/Vulkan vs RTX 3060

In a press release released today, MSI revealed the latest PSU to its line-up, the MEG Ai1300P PCIe 5.0. It claims to be the world's first to support Intel's ATX 3.0 standard as well as including support for PCIe 5.0 connectors, saying that it is “the ultimate future-proof power supply unit”.

ATX 3.0 is Intel's newest specification standard for power supply units, which provides greater reliability, and power efficiency. It can also provide any connected graphics card with up to 600 watts of power through the new PCIe 5.0 connector, which includes 12+4 pins instead of the typical 6 or 8. It was created as an answer to the ever-increasing power demands from the latest generations of graphics cards.

The key specifications of the latest PSU, the MEG Ai1300P PCIe 5.0, are that it goes up to 1300 watts, while also supporting older PCIe 4.0 connectors which will require an adaptor to work with the unit. MSI expects the upcoming next generation of NVIDIA graphics cards to require the full 600 watts of power that the PSU can provide.

MSI haven't listed a release date or even a release window for the MEG Ai1300P yet, and has not confirmed a price at time of writing.

MSI unveils the first PSU that supports Intel's new ATX 3.0 standard